Paths of Water by Laura Smith

The paths of water from the mountains to the sea give us a sense of timeless wonder. In this design, water laughs and sings as it leaps over the waterfall in rills and sprays, foaming and then pooling up in the stream, flowing ever onward to rivers, lakes and finally the ocean.

After observing a number of waterfalls, I drew the lines of the design and painted the canvas. I started with a color scheme using orange, violet and green, quite different from my usual analogous greens. I wanted orange cliffs and cool violets and blacks to make the shadowed areas recede. The triadic scheme was intentional, but somehow blue-green jumped into the water because it just looked right.

After machining dark fabrics to create the violet and black shadows, the orange cliffs were machined and hand embroidered with heavy threads to define rock-like textures. Warm orange threads were used for the cliffs and foreground stone to make them come forward, punctuating these with Tyvek "boulders" in the foreground and among the cliffs. This was my first adventure with Tyvek. The "lichens" on the foreground boulders were a happy accident caused by laying the painted Tyvek on newsprint. When the paint dried, the newsprint had bonded to it! Over-glazing made the lichens permanent and buttonhole eyelets were added by hand.

The black painted waterfall area was covered with fine blue-green tulle. The rivulets were stitched with white Accentuate and very pale blue-green Bouclé. The area was overlaid with white tulle to give the illusion of mist. The overlay also grays and lightens the waterfall area to create perspective.

Moss was machined and hand stitched in the foreground, then the water was hand stitched with blue-green silk thread. A border of gobelin stitches in dark orange was created. The smooth border provides textural contrast and repeats the darkest orange in the cliffs. The mat surrounding the work is mottled dark yellow-green, resembling foliage that the viewer might peek through to see such a scene.

To promote unity, colors are repeated extensively. Orange is used to move the eye through the design. Tiny blue-green stitches and white highlights are repeated in the cliffs, border and greenery to unify these sections with the water. Blue-green pushes orange toward red-orange and these two colors play against each other as complements with violet and green taking secondary roles.